Pee-Wee's Big Adventure

Theatrical Release: August 1985

Genre: Live-action cartoon

Starring...


Pee-Wee Herman as Himself (Ok, fine, Paul Reubens plays Pee-Wee Herman, happy?) 

Elizabeth Daily as Dottie

Mark Holton as Francis Buxton

Overview: Pee-Wee Herman, local man-child and bow tie enthusiast treks across the country in search of his stolen bike.

Expectations: So very high.

When I was growing up, my folks were stationed in Italy for a number of years, which brought with it different experiences that most other people my age cannot share with me. My sister and I lived on a villa in Sicily with an enormous orchard in the back filled with date trees, and figs, and blood oranges, and two big cement water storage tanks that had carp in them "to keep the water clean." Although now that I think about it, I have to wonder how much carp shit I ingested as a child. Our gardener, Raphael, taught us enough Italian to ask for gelato and how to change our allowance into lire to play pinball in the restaurants. No joke, this was my childhood for many years. We had no concept of the life we were missing back in the not-as-of-yet morbidly obese US-of-A, except... Once a month, we received a box of VHS tapes from one of our friends back stateside. He or she would spend what seems now to be an inordinate amount of time recording TV shows for us and sending them in a big box filled to the brim with America. See, we only had one TV channel on the military base and it was the Armed Forces Network (AFN). For those of you unfamiliar with AFN programming of the mid 80's, the selection was a little... Dated. Sure, there were plenty of Burt Reynolds movies and gripping reruns of Barnaby Jones and The Fall Guy for the grown-ups to watch but when it came to kids shows, we were allotted a two-hour block on Saturday morning only. And this was the 80's, when Saturday morning cartoons were a staple of kid-dom. There was no Cartoon Network or old episodes of Spongebob in the DVR to fall back on. While all my American counterparts were living it up watching The Flintstone Kids, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and DuckTales, I had... Aquaman. And Shazam. 

Why is his cape held on with a rope? Oh yeah... So he can go hang himself out of shame.

You can understand why the box was received with quite a lot of fanfare. With each new shipment of VHS tapes, there would inevitably be one six-hour long cassette just for us rugrats filled with Saturday morning goodness. And of course, by special request, Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Me and my sister would watch -- nay, absorb -- every episode we could get, repeating the secret word and then screaming uncontrollably until our mother would chase us out of the house yelling at us to watch more Shazam, which didn't incite any screaming, ever. For the duration of our time overseas, we reveled in our Pee-Wee's Playhouse reruns and when we got back to 'Merica, I quickly made a lot of new friends with my still dead-on Pee-Wee impression.


You could say Pee-Wee Herman was a big part of my childhood. So it should come as no surprise that my childhood effectively ended at age 11 when Paul Reubens was arrested in Sarasota, Florida in 1991 for jerking off in an adult movie theater. I had to learn in one jaw-dropping conversation with my mom who Paul Reubens was, what "masturbation" was all about, and who that homeless man was everyone kept referring to as Pee-Wee.

No, I don't have any spare change!

At the time, I felt betrayed by Pee-Wee himself but as I've gotten older, I realize I had no one to blame but a bloodthirsty media for my hero's fall from grace. I'll never understand why or how some celebrities weather their scandals and bounce back immediately while still others have to live in obscurity for years before their careers enjoy a second wind, if at all. For every Hugh Grant, Robert Downey, Jr, or Martha Stewart, there's a Mel Gibson, Jesse James, or Tiger Woods sitting on the sidelines, poring over the PR strategy employed by those who came before them, got caught getting a hummer in the Oval Office, and walked from it all nearly unscathed. But I'm not here to turn this into a discussion about scandal. We all know what happened. 

There's supposed to be a movie review in here somewhere, so let's get on with it.

In Tim Burton's first major directorial debut, we're drawn into the incredibly random world of Pee-Wee Herman, with its Rube Goldberg-esque breakfast machine, Willie the Water Bug lawn sprinkler, and the undeniable combo of Mr. T cereal on pancakes. Pee-Wee exists in a state of arrested development but not in the way your dickhole of a former roommate does with his all-night Call of Duty marathons and insistence that he lost his job because he was "too fuckin' good at it" and that his boss was threatened by that. Man up, Jake, you're 33! No, Pee-Wee is completely comfortable in his own eccentric skin, with "eccentric" just being a euphemism for "weird" provided you have some money. Which begs the question, what does Pee-Wee do for a living? I like to think he lives off the settlement money paid to him by Dow Chemicals for all the paint chips he ate as a kid. It would explain a lot... The only thing Pee-Wee takes seriously in the whole world is, of course, his tricked-out chick magnet of a bike.

"The X-1 needs to cool down."

When his prized bike is stolen while visiting his bestest girl, Dottie, at work, Pee-Wee goes absolutely bananas and embarks on a voyage to find his beloved two-wheeled conveyance. After a hot tip from Madame Ruby the psychic, Pee-Wee sets his sights for San Antonio and the basement of the Alamo which, as we all know, is the ideal place to run a bike thievery ring. Off on his journey, our hero must make his way across the country in a world where apparently airlines don't exist or maybe Greyhound wouldn't take Pee-Wee's payment of a suitcase of Mike & Ike's as legal tender. So he has to hitchhike, which is a great thing to show children it's ok to do. Pee-Wee makes many new friends on his journey, starting with the first person to pick him up while thumbing it, an escaped convict named Mickey driving a Ford Edsel. Roughly 35 minutes into the film, Pee-Wee commits his first of many criminal offenses by aiding and abetting a known felon by disguising himself and Mickey as newlyweds. They get away from the police roadblock without being found out and Mickey later repays Pee-Wee by leaving him in the middle of goddamn nowhere to die in the desert in the middle of the night.

Fortunately, Pee-Wee is rescued from death in the desert by a friendly trucker named Large Marge who regales him with a story about an accident she once witnessed. When describing the aftermath of the accident, Large Marge turns to Pee-Wee and says that when they pulled the driver from the twisted wreckage, his face looked just like this:

This is still a kid's movie, right? I didn't stumble onto the set of Creepshow?

Okaaaaay... Pee-Wee is politely informed by the patrons of the restaurant he's been dropped off at that Large Marge is, in fact, a ghost. The Large Marge scene still reigns supreme as the scariest movie moment from my childhood, even beating out Tim Curry's Pennywise from It and the entire 101 minutes of Watership Down.

Once Pee-Wee has fully recovered from his encounter with the poltergeist who was nice enough to give him a lift, he meets Simone, a square-jawed waitress who stops short of throwing her panties at Pee-Wee but still invites him to watch the sunrise from inside a dinosaur's mouth, so long as he doesn't mind the very real threat of her crazy ex-boyfriend Andy showing up to bash his skull in with an oversized femur. When that's exactly what happens, Pee-Wee commits his next serious crime when he hops a freight train to get the hell out of there and befriends a toothless hobo who, unlike real hobos, does not try to stab, rob, or sodomize this newcomer to rail riding. Pee-Wee does, however, have a twisted nightmare featuring evil clown doctors, sets that came from a Salvador Dali print, and some of the creepiest music imaginable. You didn't think this was going to stay a friendly kid's movie for more than 20 minutes, did you?

After hurling himself off a moving train to get away from the hobo (now possibly blazed out of his mind on rubbing alcohol), Pee-Wee finds himself in my least favorite city, San Antonio, and tracks down the infamous Alamo only to discover... There is no basement at the Alamo! Thanks, Madame Ruby, for proving once again that all psychics are full of shit, billing you at $4.99 a minute.

Crushed and humiliated, Pee-Wee tries to make his way back home. After some friendly bikers offer to rearrange his face, Pee-Wee wins them over by dancing the best dance ever put on celluloid, then crashes his newly acquired motorcycle through a billboard (really, really hard, I might add). Pee-Wee recognizes his bike on the TV shortly after and heads out to Hollyweird to put right what once went wrong. 

No copyright infringement intended there, Mr. Bakula.

Once Pee-Wee finds his bike on a movie set, he "steals" it away from Kevin Arnold's older brother and leads the entire Warner Brothers movie studio on what I'd dare call the best bicycle-led chase scene of all time. And it might just be me but I can't see a movie where the cast runs amok at the studio without thinking of Blazing Saddles. All that's missing was The Great Pie Fight and Dom DeLuise screaming at his flamboyant dancers. Regardless, once Pee-Wee's made a clean getaway from the long arm of the Warner Brothers studio's security guards, his complete escape is hindered by -- of course -- a pet store that's on fire. After rescuing all the animals inside (snakes included), Pee-Wee is arrested, offered a movie deal in lieu of jail time, and then rides off into the sunset with Dottie while James Brolin plays him in the over-dramatized story of his life.

You're saying he's not retarded?

Paul Reubens' ability to tap into his true inner child and conjure up Pee-Wee Herman is an unappreciated feat of acting. Not until Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat has an actor so completely immersed himself in his role that the public may not even been aware it was an act. Even Marlon Brando, a pioneer of method acting, was rumored to have not known that Pee-Wee Herman was a character invented by Paul Reubens. Adults thought Pee-Wee was weird because he either A) Was a grown man acting like someone with a learning disability ("I know you are but what am I?") or B) Was a grown man with some form of annoying mental defect. In reality, Paul Reubens was simply able to find his inner 8-year-old, put him in a gray suit and red tie, and let him run loose driving toy firetrucks into his action figures ("Look out, Mr. Potato Head!") I'm so glad to see Pee-Wee enjoying a revival in popularity, thanks to my generation realizing that maybe Paul Reubens got a raw deal. From his hit Broadway show debuting in the fall of 2010, to his appearance at a Dallas Cowboys practice session, to his surprising night out with Andy Samberg on Saturday Night Live doing shots until a chair had to be broken over Anderson Cooper's back, Pee-Wee Herman is back and better than ever.


Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is just what the title says: One big adventure, filled with amazing characters, jumping from one shenanigan to another, and is there a lesson to be learned here? Probably not. Other than don't take rides from trucker ladies.

Pee-Wee Fun Facts: Pee-Wee's Big Adventure was co-written with Paul Reubens' longtime friend, Phil Hartman, who has a brief cameo near the end of the film.

Debi Mazar

Other cameos include Milton Berle, Tom Berenger, Cassandra Peterson (the real-life Elvira), Lynn Marie Stewart (aka, Miss Yvonne), James Brolin, Morgan Fairchild, and Dee Snider. 

Paul Reubens was not involved in a long-term relationship with Big Top Pee-Wee star, Valeria Golino, as rumor had it. He did, however, have a very long relationship with Debi Mazar, an equally hot brunette. Chicks dig the bow tie.

Judd Apatow is developing the next Pee-Wee Herman movie. Dear sweet Lord, keep Adam Sandler away from that thing.


Pee-Wee's Playhouse starred Laurence "Morpheus" Fishburne as Cowboy Curtis and Phil Hartman as Captain Carl. The show also won 22 Emmy Awards during its five-year run. 

Best Scene: This one's a no-brainer...

Face it, you never hear "Tequila" without thinking of this scene.

Overall: 9 out of 10. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure loses a single point for scaring the shit out of me. But I still love you, Pee-Wee. You were the single biggest influence on my sense of humor next to Mr. Show, which I didn't even discover until age 18. Pee-Wee, you truly did get a raw deal and I'm glad you're finally getting the appreciation owed to you. And as my homage to you, here's my next tattoo...

"I'm a loner, Dottie... A rebel."